Graduate School of Design

Woody plants and evidence of browsing were measured on eight reclaimed strip mines in Maryland and West Virginia to see whether revegetation patterns differed adjacent to concave, straight, and convex forest boundaries. Two clonal species predom- inated (Rubus allegheniensis and Robinia pseudoacacia), followed in abundance by three wind-dispersed species (Fraxinus americana, Acer rubrum, Betula lenta), and a variety of animal-dispersed species. Mine transects adjacent to concave forest boundaries had 2.5 times as many colonizing stems as those next to convex boundaries. Stems of colonizing species extended > 61 m from concave boundaries, but rarely > 13 m from convex bound- aries. Stem density of all the common animal-dispersed species was correlated with their abundance in the adjacent forest edge, whereas no relationship existed for Robinia or the wind-dispersed species. Evidence of browsing was greater adjacent to concave boundaries than opposite convex boundaries. These strikingly different colonization patterns appear to be primarily the result of the immigration process interacting directly with shape as a spatial characteristic. Through time, a "concave-convex reversal" in boundary form is evident. This results from a "cove concentration effect" where the greatest boundary ex- pansion rate is in coves being colonized. Almost all patterns next to straight boundaries were intermediate between those opposite concave and convex boundaries. We conclude that boundary form may exert a powerful control over adjacent ecosystems in a landscape. This presents significant opportunities for planning and managing surface mines and other colonizing areas.

Atmospheric deposition is a significant loading pathway for polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins and dibenzofurans (dioxin) to the Great Lakes. An innovative approach using NOAA's HYSPLIT atmospheric fate and transport model was developed to estimate the 1996 dioxin contribution to each lake from each of 5700 point sources and 42 600 area sources in a U.S./Canadian air emissions inventory. These unusually detailed source-receptor modeling results show that deposition to each lake arises from a broad geographical region, with significant contributions from up to 2000 km away. The source categories contributing most significantly to 1996 dioxin deposition appear to be municipal waste incineration, iron sintering, medical waste incineration, and cement kilns burning hazardous waste. Model-predicted air concentrations and deposition fluxes were consistent with ambient measurement data, within the uncertainties in each, but there may be a moderate tendency toward underestimation using midrange emissions estimates. The most likely reason for this tendency appears to be missing or underestimated emissions sources, but in-situ atmospheric formation of octachlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxin (OCDD) and heptachlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxin (HpCDD) may have also contributed. Despite uncertainties, the findings regarding the relative importance of different sources types and source regions appear to be relatively robust and may be useful in prioritizing pollution prevention efforts.

The authors invoke a population health perspective to assess the distribution of environmental hazards according to race/ethnicity, social class, age, gender, and sexuality and the implications of these hazards for health.

The unequal burden of environmental hazards borne by African American, Native American, Latino, and Asian American/Pacific Islander communities and their relationship to well-documented racial/ethnic disparities in health have not been critically examined across all population groups, regions of the United States, and ages.

The determinants of existing environmental inequities also require critical research attention. To ensure inclusiveness and fill important gaps, scientific evidence is needed on the health effects of the built environment as well as the natural environment, cities and suburbs as well as rural areas, and indoor as well as outdoor pollutants.

[1] To simulate ozone (O3) air quality in future decades over the eastern United States, a modeling system consisting of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies Atmosphere-Ocean Global Climate Model, the Pennsylvania State University/National Center for Atmospheric Research mesoscale regional climate model (MM5), and the Community Multiscale Air Quality model has been applied. Estimates of future emissions of greenhouse gases and ozone precursors are based on the A2 scenario developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), one of the scenarios with the highest growth of CO2 among all IPCC scenarios. Simulation results for five summers in the 2020s, 2050s, and 2080s indicate that summertime average daily maximum 8-hour O3 concentrations increase by 2.7, 4.2, and 5.0 ppb, respectively, as a result of regional climate change alone with respect to five summers in the 1990s. Through additional sensitivity simulations for the five summers in the 2050s the relative impact of changes in regional climate, anthropogenic emissions within the modeling domain, and changed boundary conditions approximating possible changes of global atmospheric composition was investigated. Changed boundary conditions are found to be the largest contributor to changes in predicted summertime average daily maximum 8-hour O3 concentrations (5.0 ppb), followed by the effects of regional climate change (4.2 ppb) and the effects of increased anthropogenic emissions (1.3 ppb). However, when changes in the fourth highest summertime 8-hour O3 concentration are considered, changes in regional climate are the most important contributor to simulated concentration changes (7.6 ppb), followed by the effect of increased anthropogenic emissions (3.9 ppb) and increased boundary conditions (2.8 ppb). Thus, while previous studies have pointed out the potentially important contribution of growing global emissions and intercontinental transport to O3 air quality in the United States for future decades, the results presented here imply that it may be equally important to consider the effects of a changing climate when planning for the future attainment of regional-scale air quality standards such as the U.S. national ambient air quality standard that is based on the fourth highest annual daily maximum 8-hour O3 concentration.

A model simulation study shows that different diurnal cycles of precipitation are consistent with radically different present and future climate characteristics. In projected future climate scenarios, divergence in the time of day and type of precipitation had very divergent impacts on the radiation balance and consequently on surface temperatures. The relationship between the diurnal cycle of precipitation versus the present and future climate was examined using the GISS-MM5 (Goddard Institute for Space Studies Mesoscale Model 5) regional climate modeling system with 2 alternative moist convection schemes. June-August (JJA) mean surface temperatures of the 1990s, 2050s, and 2080s were simulated over the eastern US on a double nested 108/36 km domain, with the 36 km domain centered over the eastern US. In the 1990s, one model version simulated maxima in (convective) precipitation during the early morning, while the second model simulated the hour of precipitation maxima with considerable spatial variability (in better agreement with observations). In the futuristic climate scenarios, differences in the time of day of precipitation had very important impacts on the radiation balance at the surface. One version gave more precipitation at night and fewer clouds during the day, promoting higher surface temperatures. The alternative version created more precipitation during the day, consistent with diminished absorption of solar radiation at the surface and consequently lower surface temperatures. The results demonstrate the importance of improving cumulus parameterizations in regional mesoscale and global climate models and suggest that such improvements would lead to greater confidence in model projections of climate change.

To study the potential impacts of climate change on air quality and public health over the eastern United States, a coupled global/regional-scale modeling system consisting of the NASA-Goddard Institute for Space Studies Atmosphere–Ocean model, the MM5 mesoscale meteorological model and the Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) model for air quality has been developed. Evaluation results of the modeling system used to simulate climate and ozone air quality over the eastern United States during the five summers of 1993–1997 are presented in this paper. The results indicate that MM5 and CMAQ capture interannual and synoptic-scale variability present in surface temperature and ozone observations in the current climate, while the magnitude of fluctuations on shorter time scales is underestimated. A comparison of observed and predicted spatial patterns of daily maximum ozone concentrations shows best performance in predicting patterns for average and above-average ozone concentrations. The frequency distributions of the duration of extreme heat and ozone events show similar features for both model predictions and observations. Finally, application of a synoptic map-typing procedure reveals that the MM5/CMAQ system succeeded in simulating the average ozone concentrations associated with several frequent pressure patterns, indicating that the effects of synoptic-scale meteorology on ozone concentrations are captured by the modeling system. It is concluded that the GCM/MM5/CMAQ system is a suitable tool for the simulation of summertime surface temperature and ozone air quality conditions over the eastern United States in the present climate.

Climate change may increase the frequency and intensity of ozone episodes in future summers in the United States. However, only recently have models become available that can assess the impact of climate change on O3 concentrations and health effects at regional and local scales that are relevant to adaptive planning. We developed and applied an integrated modeling framework to assess potential O3-related health impacts in future decades under a changing climate. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration-Goddard Institute for Space Studies global climate model at 4 degrees x 5 degrees resolution was linked to the Penn State/National Center for Atmospheric Research Mesoscale Model 5 and the Community Multiscale Air Quality atmospheric chemistry model at 36 km horizontal grid resolution to simulate hourly regional meteorology and O3 in five summers of the 2050s decade across the 31-county New York metropolitan region. We assessed changes in O3-related impacts on summer mortality resulting from climate change alone and with climate change superimposed on changes in O3 precursor emissions and population growth. Considering climate change alone, there was a median 4.5% increase in O3-related acute mortality across the 31 counties. Incorporating O3 precursor emission increases along with climate change yielded similar results. When population growth was factored into the projections, absolute impacts increased substantially. Counties with the highest percent increases in projected O3 mortality spread beyond the urban core into less densely populated suburban counties. This modeling framework provides a potentially useful new tool for assessing the health risks of climate change.

Introduction: Global warming could impact human health through multiple pathways, including the shifting of ecosystems and associated vector-borne diseases, changes to water resources, and heat-related mortality. As the chemical reactions that form tropospheric ozone are temperature dependent, global warming could raise ambient ozone levels. This could subsequently result in an increase in ozone-associated health effects. Methods: Global warming’s potential effects on ambient ozone concentrations were modeled for 85 cities in the Eastern U.S. for five summers representing current climatic conditions (1993–1997) and five summers representing possible future climatic conditions (2053–2057) using the IPCC A-2 climate scenario and current emissions levels. A linked climate/air quality modeling system developed by the New York Climate and Health Project was used to derive ozone concentrations under climate change. The modeling system included the GISS global climate model (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), MM5 meteorological model (Penn State/United Corporation for Atmospheric Research), CMAQ air quality model (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency), and SMOKE emissions processor (MCNC Supercomputing Center). The difference in ozone levels predicted by the model was combined with concentration-response functions from epidemiological studies and current mortality data to estimate the changes in mortality associated with the changes in ozone concentrations. Results: Preliminary results indicate that the climate change scenario would produce higher ambient ozone levels, with an average increase of 2.8 ppb in the daily average ozone (range −0.1 to 6.4 ppb). The daily 1-hour and 8-hour maximums increased for all 85 cities, with an average increase of 4.6 and 4.2 ppb, respectively. Results were not spatially uniform with some cities experiencing larger increases than others. Louisville, Kentucky had the largest elevation in ozone levels with an increase of 9.6 ppb in the daily 1-hour maximum. Exceedances of regulatory standards would also increase under the climate change scenario. For instance, Cincinnati, Ohio is estimated to experience 12 more days exceeding the 8-hour standard under the future climatic conditions. The corresponding health effects will be estimated. For example, elevated ozone concentrations from global warming in the 2050’s is estimated to produce a 0.25% increase (95% confidence interval 0.14, 0.36%) in daily mortality, averaged across the cities, with Louisville experiencing a 0.52% increase (0.30, 0.75%) (based on meta-analysis by Thurston and Ito, 2001). Discussion: This research demonstrates global warming’s potential impact on health through the pathway of elevated ambient ozone levels. This provides evidence for decision.

Jaqueline Tyrwhitt (1905-1983) was the Director of Studies at the School of Planning and Research for Regional Development during the 1940s in Britain, where she founded the town planning Correspondence Courses for architects and others serving with the Allied Forces. With a significant enrollment, the Correspondence Courses were not a single course, but three independent and sequential courses made up of ten to twelve lectures each, with required readings and practical exercises for each lecture. They promoted collaboration among different disciplines and had a clear orientation towards practice. When the war ended a series of intensive post-war completion courses for returning ex-service men were organized, which enabled about ten percent of those enrolled in the Correspondence Courses to qualify in three months as associate members of the Town Planning Institute and enter actively into the profession. Certainly the breadth and depth of the Correspondence Courses cannot be ignored; neither can the conceptual framework within which they were conceived be overlooked. First, they were founded in the belief that it was necessary to impart knowledge of planning to potential collaborators. Second, they were grounded in the conviction that for a much needed rapid training of young field officers there was value in a course in which the theoretical and the practical were closely related. This paper focuses on the Correspondence Courses: it outlines the particular circumstances in which these courses emerged, analyzes their component parts and conceptual structure, and traces their influence in Tyrwhitt’s Harvard period when collaborating in setting up the urban design courses and program at the Graduate School of Design. In terms of the design approach, the “physical shaping of cities” as understood in the 1950s at Harvard was, in the end, not far conceptually from “shaping the environment” as understood in the Correspondence Courses that Jaqueline Tyrwhitt initiated in the 1940s.

During the second half of the twentieth century, at the time of the foundation of the Fifth Republic, French engineers endorsed enthusiastically technocratic ideals. Their attitude was not only the product of a specific context. It was rooted in a long tradition of connection between French engineering and social preoccupations. This connection emerged at the time of the creation of the first corps of State engineers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Indeed, State engineers were from the start convinced that they had a social mission. Subsequent episodes, like the Saint-Simonian reflections on the eve of industrialization, or the discussions held in the think tank X-Crise in the aftermath of the 1929 economic crisis contributed also to shape the engineers' sensitivity to social issues. Dwelling on these episodes, but also trying to go beyond their standard assessment, we would like to propose here a more general interpretation of the complex set of relations between French engineering and social thought. In this perspective, the Post-World-War-II French engineers' technocratic concerns come at the end of a long and complex evolution. This case study should enable a better understanding of the more general connivance between engineering culture and technocratic ideals.

Land use and pollutant emission changes can have significant impacts on air quality, regional climate, and human health. Here we describe a modeling study aimed at quantifying the potential effects of extensive changes in urban land cover in the New York City (NYC), USA metropolitan region on surface meteorology and ozone (O3) concentrations. The SLEUTH land-use change model was used to extrapolate urban land cover over this region from “present-day” (ca. 1990) conditions to a future year (ca. 2050), and these projections were subsequently integrated into meteorological and air quality simulations. The development of the future-year land-use scenario followed the narrative of the “A2” scenario described by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), but was restricted to the greater NYC area. The modeling system consists of the Penn State/NCAR MM5 mesoscale meteorological model; the Sparse Matrix Operator Kernal Emissions processing system; and the US EPA Community Multiscale Air Quality model, and simulations were performed for two 18-day episodes, one near-past and one future. Our results suggest that extensive urban growth in the NYC metropolitan area has the potential to increase afternoon near-surface temperatures by more than 0.6 °C and planetary boundary layer (PBL) heights by more than 150 m, as well as decrease water vapor mixing ratio by more than 0.6 g kg−1, across the NYC metropolitan area, with the areal extent of all of these changes generally coinciding with the area of increased urbanization. On the other hand, the impacts of these land use changes on ozone concentrations are more complex. Simulation results indicate that future changes in urbanization, with emissions held constant, may lead to increases in episode-average O3 levels by about 1–5 ppb, and episode-maximum 8 h O3 levels by more than 6 ppb across much of the NYC area. However, spatial patterns of ozone changes are heterogeneous and also indicate the presence of areas with decreasing ozone concentrations. When anthropogenic emissions were increased to be consistent with the extensive urbanization in the greater NYC area, the O3 levels increased in outer counties of the metropolitan region but decreased in others, including coastal Connecticut and the Long Island Sound area.

Global climate change is expected to pose increasing challenges for cities in the following decades, placing greater stress and impacts on multiple social and biophysical systems, including population health, coastal development, urban infrastructure, energy demand, and water supplies. Simultaneously, a strong global trend towards urbanisation of poverty exists, with increased challenges for urban populations and local governance to protect and sustain the well-being of growing cities. In the context of these 2 overarching trends, interdisciplinary research at the city scale is prioritised for understanding the social impacts of climate change and variability and for the evaluation of strategies in the built environment that might serve as adaptive responses to climate change. This article discusses 2 recent initiatives of The Earth Institute at Columbia University (EI) as examples of research that integrates the methods and objectives of several disciplines, including environmental health science and urban planning, to understand the potential public health impacts of global climate change and mitigative measures for the more localised effects of the urban heat island in the New York City metropolitan region. These efforts embody 2 distinct research approaches. The New York Climate & Health Project created a new integrated modeling system to assess the public health impacts of climate and land use change in the metropolitan region. The Cool City Project aims for more applied policy-oriented research that incorporates the local knowledge of community residents to understand the costs and benefits of interventions in the built environment that might serve to mitigate the harmful impacts of climate change and variability, and protect urban populations from health stressors associated with summertime heat. Both types of research are potentially useful for understanding the impacts of environmental change at the urban scale, the policies needed to address these challenges, and to train scholars capable of collaborative approaches across the social and biophysical sciences.

We investigated how climate change could affect ambient ozone concentrations and the subsequent human health impacts. Hourly concentrations were estimated for 50 eastern US cities for five representative summers each in the 1990s and 2050s, reflecting current and projected future climates, respectively. Estimates of future concentrations were based on the IPCC A2 scenario using global climate, regional climate, and regional air quality models. This work does not explore the effects of future changes in anthropogenic emissions, but isolates the impact of altered climate on ozone and health. The cities’ ozone levels are estimated to increase under predicted future climatic conditions, with the largest increases in cities with present-day high pollution. On average across the 50 cities, the summertime daily 1-h maximum increased 4.8 ppb, with the largest increase at 9.6 ppb. The average number of days/summer exceeding the 8-h regulatory standard increased 68%. Elevated ozone levels correspond to approximately a 0.11% to 0.27% increase in daily total mortality. While actual future ozone concentrations depend on climate and other influences such as changes in emissions of anthropogenic precursors, the results presented here indicate that with other factors constant, climate change could detrimentally affect air quality and thereby harm human health.